A road surface shape recognition apparatus that emits infrared light of a wavelength range corresponding to a wavelength range where external light has the weakest intensity, captures an image, and calculates the shape of a road surface on the basis of the captured image has been known (for example, see Patent Literature 1). An image processing apparatus that efficiently detects a physical object representation by separately performing histogram equalization processing steps for respective independent color pixel matrices forming a color image has been known (for example, see Patent Literature 2).